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A new hint at the performance of AMD’s next-generation Zen 2 CPUs — likely to be called Ryzen 3000-series — suggests they could be far more capable than the company’s existing chips. The rumor claims that they offer as much as a 13-percent improvement in instructions per clock (IPC), which when combined with a likely clock speed increase and maybe even additional cores, could see AMD steal the performance crown from Intel in more than just multi-threaded settings.

AMD’s first-generation Ryzen CPUs offered more than 50 percent improvement in instructions per clock over its predecessor chips. That, combined with additional cores made AMD’s CPUs competitive with Intel at the top end for the first time in a long time. Intel still retained a small but noticeable lead in single-threaded and gaming scenarios, but AMD’s Zen+ Ryzen 2000-series CPUs closed the gap a little more with a further three-percent increase in IPC over the first Ryzen chips. If claims of a 13-percent increase in IPC with Zen 2 hold true, AMD may pull ahead of Intel in gaming and single-threaded tasks, and may offer greater multi-threaded performance, too.

This latest rumor comes from Twitter user Bits and Chips, via Hexus. While Bits and Chips suggests that its tweets shouldn’t be taken too seriously, it has in the past leaked news for Zen which turned out to be correct. It claims that a source who works at a “big company” shared the “13 percent” figure, but didn’t relay much clarification for it.

The source did claim that clock speeds won’t change much between the Zen+ and Zen 2 generations. That said, since the 7nm process should be more efficient, it may open up more room for overclocking in turn.

The Zen 2 architecture is expected to make its debut at CES 2019, with some suggestion that the first CPUs will go on sale in May that same year. We did hear rumblings that top Zen 2 CPUs may raise the core count to 16, but we would expect most Ryzen 3000 CPUs to retain more common core counts to focus performance on limited thread software like gaming.

For those already running Ryzen CPUs, either first or second-generation, the most exciting part of this is that motherboards will be immediately compatible with Zen 2 chips when they debut. The AM4 socket is being used for all generations of Zen right through until 2020, so AMD fans won’t need to factor in a motherboard upgrade just to retain the latest and greatest performance.